The slave ship
that was in this same Africa that had been known so long and both
favorably and unfavorably. I talked quite steadily and lucidly, as in a
dream. He laughed again and said, “A Scot is a strange animal! Are you
drunk or are you not? I swear I’m not certain which!”
But I was drunk and capable of wrecking a ship, my own or another.
The small house had the same guttering, blowing candles. By their vague
light coming forth from the interior, I perceived two forms upon the
verandah. As we stepped upon it, they moved with a kind of fluttering
and a low, nervous, catching laughter. The one vanished around the
angle of the verandah, the other remained. Lace put out an arm. “Are
you there, Fanny?”
“Yaas, sah.”
He drew her forward. “She’s Fullah--like Lalla. She’s a good girl and
has a little, a very, very little English.”
He pushed her toward me, just sufficiently, so that her brown, warm arm
came under my hand. “My room’s round the corner,” he said. “See you in
the morning--but sleep as late as you choose! Only no one can really
sleep after dawn in this place.” With which he bade me good night and
was gone, leaving Fanny’s arm under my hand.
CHAPTER XIII
The _Janet_ took a fortnight for unlading, cleaning, mending
and preparing for the Jamaica cargo. We all kept fairly busy, seeing
that it was Africa. In my charge now rested merchants’ books, lists,
tallies, receipts. At some hour of the day I went over all with my
kinsman in the cabin, but the actual clerkly labor and the actual
supervision to a degree were mine. Bartram seemed satisfied and I was
glad to do it. I had a power of work in me when I turned that way.
After the first night I drank no more to excess of Daga punch. Bartram
had said, “Mind you what you are about, David! I’ve seen many a tall
ship wrecked on this coast. As for Rathbone Lace, I’m fair to hope he
couldn’t have been bred in Scotland!”
I laughed. “I’ve heard of Captain McKenzie.”
“McKenzie’s a changeling and a byword. He’s not the least like any
McKenzie at home.”
McKenzie was the captain of the _Darling_ and if Colley and others
told true, there were oceans in hell and he had long been sea captain
there. But the younger Lace did not seem to me quite of that energy.
I worked with him in the tally and transfer of cargo to the Daga
warehouse. Baker and Brown and Andrews and Hyde and Graves and others
worked also. Sometimes we were upon the _Janet_, sometimes on the
beach, sometimes in Daga fort, in the long warehouse, in the sunbaked
enclosure. Work began early but stopped when the sun stood a little
past noon. Except for an hour or so with Bartram, the rest of the time
until dawn again was my own.
I remember the sands of Daga that were so white. The boats--the native
boats--brought from the _Janet_ boxes and bales and casks. Black
men waiting knee-deep in the water lightened the boats and heaped the
merchandise upon the sand. Black men, a line of them, shouldered the
lighter things or carried between them the heavier, and bearing them up
the sloping sand vanished with them through the dark and low entrance
of the castle. They were powerfully built black men, naked save for
the loin cloth, belonging to and serving the Company. Among them some
worked mum as logs, others chanted and laughed and joked. So it had
been in Virginia. They were naked here; they had clothing there. Here
they used an African tongue, there they had learned or were learning an
English one. Here was home, there another race’s home. The sea struck
ceaselessly against the Slave Coast. So they carried in the goods that
were to buy for another continent their kind, maybe their immediate
kith and kin; maybe, if they displeased any here, themselves. Muskets,
rum and powder--tobacco, tools and gaudy cloth--crockery, beads and
mirrors. I saw the English multitude toiling to make all this with
which to buy, and that multitude themselves seemed slaves. And then I
shut all such thoughts and images under hatches and went and drank with
Rathbone Lace, and was myself--and not only in the drink--a slave.
At the warehouse toiled Baker and Brown with one or two nondescript
whites and a dozen blacks to help. The warehouse was inside the castle,
a long, shallow structure, stone against the stones of the wall. Around
spread the baked earth, a square big enough for a town market. The sun
beat on the stockade within the square where through the day was herded
the _Janet’s_ lading that was to take the place of boxes, bales
and casks. It was as large as a palaver ground. By dint of crowding,
its citizens could make a space for dancing, for the beaters of drums,
for exhorters and prophets, tellers of stories and starters of songs;
space too for the serving of meals which were plentiful. It was policy
to keep them cheerful. No one wanted pining skeletons for Jamaica or
anywhere else. Their drums and lutes were given them; they were urged
to dance, to sing, to eat. So far as their exhorters chose to encourage
them, these were given full swing. The ordering of the barracoon fell
to Berry the assistant and his helpers. Berry was not a bad sort, but
had a kind of wry joviality and a parental bearing. When he appeared in
the place it was always to say, in effect, “How well we’re getting on!
Let’s have a feast--but it’s nothing, you know, to the feasts they give
in Jamaica!”
Through the day, at intervals, the drums beat and there was singing
and dancing and noise. Till an hour before sunset. Then the square was
emptied, the drove vanished into those chambers within the walls, and
all was still.
One morning, having an unoccupied hour, I found myself with Colley upon
the wall. Hard by stood one of those guns trained within, and near
to it talked among themselves three of Berry’s guards, white men who
looked much like pirates without a ship.
I said, “Do they ever rise?”
He answered, “Two or three times in ten years. When by chance there’s
among them some spirit of war and leadership.”
“Wallace or Bruce?”
“Anan?” he said. “I don’t think it goes as far as that. Anyhow, it’s
the most hopeless of enterprises! There’s a tradition that once they
burned and slew and swarmed away and were never taken, but it must have
been very long ago.”
I said, “In Virginia it was white slavery that was concerning me most.
But is there any difference?”
He said, “There you go again! When I look at them I do not see white
men and women.”
“No, but men and women.”
He swung round upon me. “Why, then, do you not make your choice?
Yonder’s a path into the forest and after a while another path and
another and another! You come to towns, palaver grounds, chiefs’
houses, black people, black merchants and traders, black princes and
priests, thousands and thousands of black people, the land’s so full!
Why not go preach to them? Or, better still, why not preach in the
factor’s house this evening? Preach to white men and the Royal African
Company?”
I answered him sullenly, “I am no preacher.”
“I thought,” he said, “that we agreed upon the _Janet_ that we
could not change the world. And I’ve thought at the factor’s and with
Rathbone Lace you were beginning to be fairly reconciled!”
I saw that I was, and I saw for a moment my blackness, I who had been a
slave.--Then Fanny and the drink and Bartram and the ship and Security
for David Scott, with clerkly work that did not come hard, and goodly
books with leisure to read them, and coin in his pocket, and some
seeing of the world after all, and friends. Security, friends, a good
ship and the blue, salt sea.--_And at any time I might quit!_
I was not lost enough to say brazenly to myself, “I will not quit just
yet.” But underneath, underneath consciousness, as it were, it was
said. “_I will not quit just yet. Jamaica? Perhaps not even then._”
Immediately, there in the sunshine, things shifted a little. I saw the
barracoon under a more favorable light. Under the light, in short, in
which Colley and Bartram saw it. Yes, there was a woman weeping there.
Yes, there sat a man in a gloom that darkened the sun around. Yes,
that knot yonder was sending forth a chant that could only be likened
to the one hundred and thirty-seventh psalm. Yes, there seemed some
wretchedness in the barracoon. _But was it so bad after all? Nothing
was idyllic in Africa, anyway. And one must live, and the shape of the
world is past our changing. And of course nothing in any one else had
the poignancy I found in myself. They did not feel as I felt._
I said, “Well, they are laughing over there! And that girl who is
dancing seems to enjoy her dance.”
Rathbone Lace came up behind us. “We’ve missed you and Mr. Markham, Mr.
Colley! You’ve been up the river?”
“Yes, up to Oil Palm village,” answered Colley. “There’s a man there
with a melancholy Mr. Markham wanted me to see.”
“Did you cure him?”
“It was to observe an interesting case. I don’t think it is curable.”
We leaned upon the parapet and looked down into the stockade. “Your
five hundred,” said Lace, “is about made up. Three hundred men, one
hundred women, seventy young boys, thirty girls under twelve. There
are a few lacking, but Gambo will bring them in presently. You’ve got
an unusually strong, good lot! Mandingoes, Fullahs, Dualas, Soo-Soos,
Ashantis and Coromantins.”
Said Colley, “Coromantins and Ashantis are fierce and bold barbarians,
Dualas and Soo-Soos are tractable as sheep, Mandingoes and Fullahs are,
so to speak, gentry.”
“Aye,” said Lace, “but in the market all alike.--When do you begin
lading?”
He spoke to me. I answered, “A week from to-morrow.”
“Then we’ll have time to go up the river for two or three days if you
like. You’ve never been up an African river. We’ll go up to Oil Palm
village in my boat. Saturday?”
“I’ll ask the Captain.”
I did so. Bartram gloomed a little, then said, “Africa is biting you,
David. Well, you’ll have to have it over with. There’s no saving a man
from himself.” He drummed on the table. “My self didn’t come to me as
Rathbone Lace, but perhaps as an ill a man.”
I said that I didn’t quite understand him, but the Inner Man did
understand. The Inner Man is never less than clear-eyed.
Lace and I with five Negroes went up the Daga River in a boat carrying
little food, for we would get that ashore, but with a great jug of
Jamaica rum.
At first, to either hand there spread great coverlets of mud, forlorn
with rubbish of the forest and the sea, and the water was dull and
brackish. I saw here crocodiles and many a wading bird. By degrees,
this changed to soil, black and loose and unfathomably rich. Here began
the great trees and the marvelous blossoms. Here I saw parrots. The
black men rowed us on, and now and then we drank. At times a forest
overarched the stream so dense that there was as little seeing into it
as into a stone wall. At times we passed clearings where there seemed
to have been old cultivation. At times the trees were set as in a
park, and a path ran by the water, a manifest, cheerful, trodden path.
“Africa is full of paths,” said Lace. “Even the caravans know in the
desert the way to go.”
“We are far, far away from the deserts.”
“Yes. There are few people in the desert. But the Africa we know about
is full of people, and these are their roads.”
“What size is the Africa we know about?”
“God or the Devil knows!” he answered. “The size of Europe, maybe.
Trade comes to the Coast from as far away as Russia--were we in London
or Bristol. Down a hundred rivers like this and over a crisscross
forever of forest paths.”
“The Coast is their Ind or Ophir.”
“You seem to read poetry.--Every black or brown kingling at any
distance whatever, and every soul in the territory that he rides, knows
that muskets and knives and rum and toys grow on the Slave Coast.”